http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |NASHUA, N.H.---
The trees are ablaze with yellows and reds and, since an early snowfall the night before, blanketed with white as well. All that color in southern New Hampshire in mid-autumn, however, is more than a visual display. It underlines how mixed up the seasons are -- how mixed up our politics are -- in the final months before the first presidential primary.

But this is also the season for Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Texas congressman who for a quarter century has been railing about government spending, the Fed, the overextension of American military power, the gold standard and, until recently, has been relegated to the periphery of our politics.

Now, Dr. Paul, an obstetrician and midwife to a movement, is suddenly front and center, though not exactly occupying the center of our politics.

Which may be why, well before 7:30 of a recent morning, several hundred of Nashua's respectables -- there were so many gray suits in the ballroom of the Marriott Courtyard that you could have held a Jos. A Bank trunk show -- gathered in the early chill to hear Dr. Paul talk about interest rates, the perfidy of the Fed and an economy where the overlords are suggesting that "working hard and saving is wrong."

He spoke, too, of the NASDAQ bubble, the housing bubble, the bond bubble -- and with every speech (and a barrage of ads on Granite State television) is building a Ron Paul bubble.

"We spent too much, we ran up a debt, we regulated too much and then we said we can't handle it all so we'll depend on the Fed," he said. There wasn't a set of notes in sight, nor in his suit pocket. He's given this riff for decades. "We continue to spend, the deficit has exploded, we continue to borrow and we continue to tax -- and we wonder why we haven't had a recovery."

This is not a message that is alien to this terrain. Long before some of the members of the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce came of age politically, New Hampshire politicians, especially Gov. Meldrim Thomson Jr., who presided in Concord from 1973 to 1979, spoke in an idiom much like Dr. Paul's. He was the original voice for original intent in this state, the leading critic of the United Nations, the most vocal opponent of taxes.

So if the Paul message of "freedom and prosperity" is to flourish anywhere, this is the place -- and this is the time.

"He reminds us that the government has a limited role, not an expansive role," said Ovide Lamontagne, unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate here in 1996 and a candidate again in 2012. Mr. Lamontagne is not committed to any presidential candidate, but he regards the Paul candidacy "a statement of empowerment, not powerlessness."

Nobody is predicting that Dr. Paul will prevail in January's primary. Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has roots too deep in this region and is in too strong a position, at least right now. But the Nashua crowd wasn't only full of the converted. It was crowded, too, with the curious.

One of them was Bob Hallowell, president of the Nashua School Board, so far uncommitted to any candidate. He's thinking about Dr. Paul because he's "the only one who got the financial crisis right." Another was Davi Peters, a Nashua attorney. "I'm just curious," she said. "I'm here to listen."

For years Ron Paul events didn't attract the curious, who were repelled by the true believers, committed supporters like Robert Carley, who rose at 3 a.m. to drive from Darien, Conn., to Nashua to present Dr. Paul with a cartoon of the candidate. "He has a great face to caricature -- interesting eyes, high eyebrows," Mr. Carley said. "But I admire his conservative policies. He was prophetic about the economy and all the money we wasted in Iraq."

Dr. Paul is a political perennial, which ordinarily is a political liability -- nobody wants his name linked with Dennis Kucinich or Harold Stassen. But Dr. Paul is a perennial with a difference. No longer are he and his views colorful eccentricities. He's not the only one skeptical of the Fed, nor the only one worried about federal spending. His $2 million ad offensive here -- the earliest big TV bang yet -- has a simple theme: the changing views of his rivals and the consistency of his own views.

He hasn't adjusted his message to the current debate. The current debate has been bent to his message.

"I don't know whether things have come my way or not," he said in an interview. "A lot of mistakes have been made and people are paying new attention to all this overspending."

Today, with the economy still in distress and foreign wars causing increasing distress, a Venn diagram of Dr. Paul's ideas would give a viewer a serious case of vertigo.

His position on the Fed intersects that of Sen. Bernard Sanders, the Vermont socialist. His position on spending intersects that of the tea party. His position on foreign intervention intersects those of some conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. And he sees allies in Occupy Wall Street.

"The street demonstrations are symbols of our problems," he said in the interview. "It's now important that all that energy be channeled in the right way. A lot of those people are skeptical of the Fed. But some of them want to penalize anybody who's successful. That's not the way to go."

All those intersections explain why he was asked here by a woman who's an officer in the National Guard whether he'd withdraw American troops from Afghanistan (his answer: "Just come home") and by a man who described himself as a carpenter, wilderness guide, teacher and novelist whether the Fed was "a cabal of international bankers" (Dr. Paul: "We can get rid of it by congressional action").

Listen to the heart of the Paul message:

"The Constitution is to protect individuals' rights to make their own choices," he said. "We have accepted this idea that the government can be so big that it can bankrupt our economy and endanger our liberties. We have to decide what the role of government should be."

Every one of those sentences could be spoken in 2012 by any number of Republican candidates.

Dr. Paul is running for more than president. He is running to make his ideas part of the mainstream debate. He'll likely lose the first campaign. He's already won the second.

David Shribman, a Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Previously:

10/31/11 Why Cain isn't able
10/10/11 GOP starting over
10/03/11 The Forgotten War of 1812
09/26/11 The way we live now
09/19/11 The crisis this time
09/11/11 But what will it mean?
09/05/11 A horse race column: Who might win the GOP nomination and how it might unfold
08/29/11 The vacuum calls
08/22/11 Passion and politics: How Barack Obama and Mitt Romney got crowded into the same dangerous corner
08/15/11 Eleanor's little village
08/08/11 The agony of August
08/01/11 The politics of the impossible: What a country this might be if the political class served the broad interests of the majority
07/25/11 Pennant fever grips 'Burgh
07/18/11 Exemplar of an era
07/11/11 On summer
07/04/11 The soul of the party
06/27/11 What the Secretary said
06/20/11 Romney has big advantages over his rivals, but they will be coming after him
06/06/11 One question each
05/30/11 The 14-week challenge
05/23/11 Delay tactics
05/16/11 Republicans are waiting
05/09/11 Bin Laden is dead. What does it mean?
05/02/11 From nobodies to nominees
04/25/11 The founders left slavery for future generations to settle, and we still haven't fully come to terms with it
04/18/11 From audacious to cautious
04/11/11 Dreaming of space
12/12/10 The GOP takes control
12/06/10 DECEMBER 7
11/29/10 GOP presidential hopefuls already are lining up local supporters in what is now a red state
11/22/10 Burning down the House
11/15/10 Institutions of higher learning are finally beginning to teach important lifeskills
11/04/10 The war has just begun
11/01/10 Echoes of a speech 40 years ago this week still resonate today
10/25/10 50 years ago America chose between two men who were dramatically different --- and eerily similar